Why your brand needs a Villian - Narrative Positioning with Joe Daniels

Joe (00:02.51)
Show.

Eric M. (00:02.749)
My sound editor said that, hey, talk for like 30 seconds first because I don't know, it just needs some time to get the recording right. What part of, yeah, what part of England are you in?

Joe (00:09.934)
Okay, some sort of additive magic.

I'm in Sheffield. I don't know if you know that. Most people don't. It's in the north near Manchester, near Manchester way.

Eric M. (00:17.021)
Okay.

I've heard of it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know I have a friend who, who lives in Manchester and I think he may live in Sheffield because I heard of it and I was going to visit him. And, I remember we were talking about trains and I, that city popped up or something. I didn't end up going out there, but I have heard of it. Yeah.

Joe (00:28.942)
cool. cool. Yeah.

Joe (00:39.47)
Right, cool. Yeah, yeah, no, cool. Yeah, way about to you.

Eric M. (00:43.837)
So I'm from Houston, but I live in Bucharest, Romania. So, yeah, Eastern Europe.

Joe (00:47.47)
interesting, yeah cool. How long have you been out there?

Eric M. (00:52.637)
Almost four years. Yeah, almost four years. Yeah. I lived here many years ago, back in 2010 for one year. That's how I met my, my wife. I convinced her to move to the States and then we came, came back about four years ago. Okay. All right. Let's go ahead and jump into this. Let me see here. Okay. All right. Joe, welcome innovators can laugh. How you doing today?

Joe (00:54.67)
Wow, okay. Nice.

Joe (01:02.702)
okay. Yeah.

that's cool.

Joe (01:11.854)
Yeah, cool.

Joe (01:18.222)
Hey, yeah, good to thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Eric M. (01:20.957)
Yeah, my pleasure. Okay, rapid fire questions here. The first one is, what is a favorite TV show that you can watch again and again?

Joe (01:29.838)
How I Met Your Mother, the sitcom, like sort of like the millennial friends, I guess, I don't know. Yeah, that always could go back to that one. Yeah.

Eric M. (01:35.869)
The millennial friends.

Eric M. (01:41.373)
Cool, I've never heard that term the way the millennial friends, but that's a good explanation for it.

Joe (01:44.846)
well, yeah, I mean, I might just make that up. But yeah, there you go.

Eric M. (01:48.337)
Yeah, okay. What is an unusual thing you do to wow clients to wow them to make them feel great?

Joe (01:56.91)
I always ask personal details, right? Like I always kind of want to get to like them as a person rather than just them as a job, if that makes sense. So like instead of just talking about, how's work? It's more like, what are you doing this weekend? You know, what are you doing? What do you do for fun? What's, so I'll drill down into, into their life behind the screen, sort of thing.

Eric M. (02:18.301)
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's good way to build rapport. I found that here in Eastern Europe, it's a little bit harder to build rapport versus back in the States. It's a little bit different. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they're actually easier to develop rapport than the Dutch. The Dutch that I have found are the most difficult to build rapport with because they tend to be so direct. They're so direct and they're very serious. At least in my opinion. Yeah.

Joe (02:26.766)
really? A bit more closed off.

Joe (02:36.558)
Okay.

Joe (02:40.174)
Okay.

Yeah, just like get to the point. Okay.

Eric M. (02:47.933)
Yeah, get to the point. Okay. All right. So next, yeah, this, if I was interviewing a Dutch person and we started off with rapid fire questions, they would be like, what the hell did I get myself into? You know?

Joe (02:56.206)
Yeah, all they'd be really good, right? They'd just be like, answer, answer, answer, no waffle between. Yeah. I feel like we're bordering on racism, so let's move on.

Eric M. (03:03.389)
Very true, very true. Okay, another one.

Yeah, okay one more here. What was a favorite childhood toy you played with?

Joe (03:17.166)
I don't know if you know the film Small Soldiers. It was basically a film about these little toy action hero things that are actually alive in some way that I can't really remember. And like I say in the real world, but there's these toys that come to life and fight these two warring factions. And one of them was this, the leader of this like monster faction. I don't know. So much I know about this was called...

Eric M. (03:26.941)
Yay -ay.

Eric M. (03:31.997)
Yeah.

Joe (03:45.902)
I want to say something along the lines of Archagon or something. And I had like a little toy, one of these that could like talk when you pressed his little thing and like he could, you know, just move him around, play with him. Loved that. We played with that all the time. I think we were basically inseparable. He was my only friend. He was my only friend growing up.

Eric M. (03:50.525)
Yeah.

Eric M. (04:01.757)
Yeah.

Okay, I'm gonna look for that because I've got a seven -year -old son and I think he would be into that movie. Yeah, so...

Joe (04:07.438)
Say yeah.

Joe (04:11.246)
yeah, I will find a link for you and send it over at some point. I should probably watch it again myself, so yeah.

Eric M. (04:17.309)
Okay. Send it over. Yeah. Send me the link. Okay. Last rapid fire question for you. what do Aristotle, what do Aristotle Shakespeare in you have in common?

Joe (04:24.43)
Yeah.

Yeah, good question. Yeah. So we all kind of developed our own narrative frameworks, right? So Aristotle has his, I think he was the three act one, right? I think he was like, yeah, you know, got three acts beginning, middle end sort of thing. Shakespeare then sort of took it further and went, actually let's give it five acts and here's how it all works with his plays.

It's been ages since I did English literature so I can't tell you any more than that. And then I've got my own. I have my own narrative framework that I use with clients. It doesn't involve any apps, unfortunately, but hopefully it's still useful. Yeah.

Eric M. (05:05.501)
No acts.

Eric M. (05:09.949)
Okay, well one thing I saw in your post is that it's like niche versus narrative and you're saying that the general advice out there is to position your product within a particular niche, but you say you should focus on something you call narrative positioning. Can you give an example and what does a narrative need?

Joe (05:16.046)
Yeah.

Joe (05:21.742)
Mm -hmm.

Joe (05:30.958)
Yeah, so I guess the first thing is like I position it as this battle between the two and it kind of is, but the reality is you kind of need both levels stacked on top of each other. I think it's still helpful to niche down as much as you can. But that used to be considered like the silver bullet, right? It was like, all you need to do is pick a niche and you're going to win. It's like, well, I don't think that's the case anymore because...

You know, if you named a niche right now, I bet you anything, there's multiple competitors in that niche. So like, it's just the nature of SaaS, right? Is that there's so many that you're still going to have competition. And so what narrative does is it kind of adds a layer on top and goes, well, okay, how do we in that niche, how do we take ownership of it with something that goes beyond just being in that niche, if that makes sense. So you asked for an example, I suppose.

A couple of examples spring to mind. A classic one is Drift, which I'm sure you'll have heard of, most of the listeners probably have heard of. And what Drift did was they were in the chat widget space, I'm going to say, I'm going to call it back, where everyone had a little chat bot in the corner of the website. And there were multiple tools that could do that, right? There were multiple tools that could put a little chat bot in, Intercom was another big one at the time. And...

What Drift did, and a lot of people say Drift created a category, and I don't think that's technically true because no one said, they're a conversational marketing tool, which is the thing that they coined. They still said they were a chat, the chat widget thing. But what they did was instead of niching, right, if they'd gone with the old way, they would have niched down and would have said, we're a chat widget. And they would have chosen some random niche, let's say accountants and gone, we have a chat widget for accountants.

great, we're going to win the accountant's market. And they might have won the accountant's market. But then it's like, but that's quite small compared to the full market that they could have had. How do you then expand outwards? Right. They would have been stuck because Intercom, meanwhile, would have gone, yeah, well, we do this market, this market, this market. You know, it's almost like just sharing out the spoils sort of thing. And so what Drift did was they went, well, why don't we go to market with some kind of narrative? And they saw that...

Joe (07:47.982)
What the chat widgets did was almost enable a new avenue of marketing, which they called conversational marketing. And they pitched that against the villains, so to speak, which was not having those conversations with customers and almost pitching to them rather than talking with them. And so they went to market with a narrative that they positioned their product around. And it meant that people bought into that concept, that movement.

And then obviously if you bought into that, you're going to then use Drift as the product because it's like, well, I get these guys get it. These guys are saying the right things. So it makes sense that their product is the best one to use for that. So that was a classic example. And then.

Eric M. (08:35.837)
Let's do a real life exercise right here if you don't mind. Why don't you go to my website, b2bpodpros .com and just take a look at my messaging on the very front page here. And tell me if you think if I'm falling more into like a narrative positioning or if my messaging just sucks. Okay. And I've played around with different headlines before.

Joe (08:40.366)
Sure, yeah.

Joe (08:46.766)
-huh.

Joe (08:51.182)
I am.

Eric M. (09:05.405)
And for those listening on the homepage, the main message is we don't just sell ad spots, we create a new growth channel for you. And how does, I mean...

Joe (09:06.702)
Yep.

Joe (09:16.622)
Yeah, this is a really clever way to get some free consultation. I like it. So, yeah, so, okay. So we don't just sell ad spots. We create a new growth channel for you. I think what's interesting is you've kind of started to lean into a narrative, which I see a lot is people kind of dabbling in it. But I think you could probably go further because my first question is like, what's wrong with just selling ad spots?

Eric M. (09:38.653)
Mm -hmm.

Joe (09:46.446)
Right, like why is that a bad thing? Because here, that's your villain that you're hinting at, right? Is we don't just sell ad spots.

Eric M. (09:52.061)
You're right. Right.

Joe (09:53.998)
But what you've done, and I see this a lot, and so it's, you know, it's, everyone does this, is you've kind of then gone straight, when you scroll down, gone straight to how we contribute to your sales pipeline and spoke about you and your solution, right? And you've not really given any time to introduce the villain. And so, you know, if you think about, if you think about all your favorite movies where there's a, you know, the villain often steals the show, but the reason they do that is because you have a few scenes towards the start of that movie.

Eric M. (10:12.765)
That's good.

Joe (10:23.694)
where they show the villain doing villainous things, right? They show Darth Vader chopping through people, using the Force to get to Princess Leia, right? Because you'd need to see that he exists and that he's bad and mean and scary, because then the rest of it has that context behind it.

if it had just started with a whiny little farm boy just running around a desert planet you'd kind of be like, okay cool what are the stakes here like you know why don't you just stay on the farm but now you know that there's a big villain you're like well we have to take that villain down and I think that's what you're missing currently is that villain section of the home page so to speak if that makes sense.

Eric M. (10:58.717)
Okay. I love this. I love this. So I got it. It's missing like what's wrong with, you know...

Eric M. (11:09.245)
Yeah. Yeah. No, I love this because you said that obviously the villains missing and people don't know what's so bad about just ad spots. So I need to have in section two, a good visual and messaging like, well, this is what's wrong with it. And that's completely missing. So thank you so much for that free consultation. That was the price. That was the price you paid for being on the show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe (11:22.734)
Mm -hmm.

Joe (11:26.414)
Yeah

Joe (11:30.766)
Yeah, okay, we're even now, right? That's...

Eric M. (11:34.877)
But you did send me this graphic that showed, you know, niche versus narrative positioning and what are the benefits of the two. And I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about that and why you think it's so much better for a brand to have a narrative position.

Joe (11:47.95)
Yep.

Joe (11:52.91)
Yeah, sure. So, I guess the first thing to say is to start with the niche positioning and what that does well. And what that does well is it goes, instead of taking on all of the market at once, let's pick one tiny segment of the market and focus in on them first. And I think that first is the crucial bit because yes, you can build...

a business just in one, you know, my business and, you know, same as yours is aimed at one niche type of buyer. I could make a healthy living just staying in that niche. And actually the plan is to just stay in that niche, right? I can get the expertise. But that's also because there's only so many customers I can have. But with SaaS, it's a bit different because actually SaaS scales, right? By design, you could have millions of customers using your platform. It almost seems silly.

to say, well, let's stick in that niche forever. Because it's like, well, what about all of these? Are these not valid use cases outside of your niche? They probably are. And so it's like, well, why would you not want to expand over time? And so what niche positioning does is it goes, we do X for Y. Great, cool. But when you want to expand out of that, your positioning is then hindering that expansion, right? So where the narrative comes in as it goes, well, actually,

If, you know, with Drift's example of conversational marketing, that can apply to multiple niches. So actually as they expand outwards with their marketing and sales efforts and growth efforts, that narrative doesn't actually need to change that much. It might flex slightly according to the audience, but the underlying principle is the same. So it's able to adapt to new markets and opportunities that come up over time.

So that's one of the benefits of narrative is the sort of longevity of it. But then there's also the kind of, it steps a lot more into the brand marketing side, right? So people love stories, you know, like stories are one of the first things that humans ever did, right? It's how we communicate it in cave paintings and sitting around campfires and eating steaks that we've hunted. I don't know, I wasn't there, but it sounds like that's what happened. And...

Eric M. (14:09.757)
Wild yeah, wild pigs. Yeah. Yeah, I got it. I know I know

Joe (14:12.782)
Exactly, yeah, just like you throw spears, tell a story about how you caught the pig, you know, the good old days. But the reason for that is because stories stick in your head, you know, I saw a stat somewhere, I can't remember the source, but it was like things presented in a story format remembered 22 times more or something than just facts. Like our brains are hardwired to remember stories and so...

If the whole point of positioning is to own a place in people's minds, not just in the market, well, then you want to do that with a story because that's what's going to stick. And so that's why it's important for that too. It also in the same vein resonates on a more emotional level, right? So like it's one thing to go, this is what our product does, here's our capabilities. It's like, well, you know, okay, cool. If you can...

express those same capabilities in the form of a story and in form of a problem and a villain and so on then it's speaking to an emotional level as well as rational so it's kind of that two -pronged approach to really sort of hammer home the message.

and then once the other things I've said, I think I've said some elements, it starts a movement around your product. And I think that's again, with the drift example, the conversational marketing was a movement, right? It was let's do something differently. Let's do this. Like the old way is bad. The new way is good. Join, join our movement, become an evangelist for us. And so people would go be proud to like, yeah, you know, we're part of this movement of conversational marketing. And so.

they almost end up doing the marketing for you as well because they're part, they belong to this movement and this community rather than just, I'm a customer of this product.

Eric M. (15:52.061)
Yeah, and the old way could be a villain. So like my villain is obviously the large ad networks. And I think you said that there's three types of villains that you can choose. One was like the status quo sloppiness villain. I like these names you've given them. Yeah, tell us about that one. And then the other two that you coined as well.

Joe (15:56.494)
Yeah.

Joe (16:01.102)
Hmm.

Joe (16:05.07)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe (16:14.446)
Yeah, sure. So status quo, when I talk about that, what I'm talking about is the old way to a certain extent. It's just that what, what often happens depending on the maturity of the market and your category, the old way could be completely different to your platform, right? So it's kind of an indirect competitor. So if traditionally someone's using a spreadsheet to track their data,

and you come up with a tool that does that for you and without them, the spreadsheet is the status quo. Spreadsheets the old way. And obviously then your narrative would basically be like, why are you still using spreadsheets? You know, like spreadsheets are bad for this reason and this reason, like all of these headaches you get from spreadsheets, we can solve that with our platform that does it all for you kind of thing, right? That's obviously a basic idea, basic framework. So you're fighting against an indirect competitor.

And that's often the case for early stage markets, emerging markets where there isn't much direct competition. It's kind of a whole new thing that you're doing. So there's not much other tools that do it, but your job then is to convince them to leave the old method of doing it behind. That's the status quo one. Then in the middle, you've kind of got what I call category norm confusion. And so a category don't, there's a lot of terms flying around here. Category norm is essentially,

The category is a bit more established. So I don't know CRMs, there's loads of those, right? That's an established market. People know what CRMs are. They probably already use one. So it's not like they're using a spreadsheet for this. They're probably using some kind of CRM tool.

What your job then is to do as someone in trying to win over part of that market is to go, well, what's wrong with CRMs at the moment? What are some of the normal, the things we take for granted, the norms of this category that actually are probably hindering customers ability to do what they want to do. They're the category norms that you then need to fight against. And so it's like, I can't think of an example of Tomahead, but if it was like,

Joe (18:24.91)
most CRMs force you to manually update your data while we have this AI widget that actually automatically pulls in all the conversations you've had and transcribes them and stuff. I've just made that up obviously, but it's essentially fighting against... the villain becomes something that is normal in your industry, but shouldn't be, I suppose is the idea. And then the third one is where you...

Eric M. (18:48.669)
Yeah. And that's a tough one. Cause when I think of Asana, I always think of like Trello, Asana, Monday. And to me, they're kind of just all the same. I mean, I don't even use any of them, but I feel like they're all kind of just the same. So that's a tough one, I think.

Joe (18:56.206)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think, and I think, I think the reason is because to be fair, like, and obviously I'm biased to say this is the reason, but like, it's because they don't have a narrative, right? Like you just know them all for what they do and their capabilities and their capabilities are the same. Like you just said, right? They do the same thing. If, if Asana came out and said, actually look, the way these tools work is broken because of this.

And so we've decided to pivot and do something slightly differently here with our product. Well, then Asana would stick out of those tools. Are you like, okay. Yeah. So I can see why Asana are different because of this narrative. And so it might not be you choose Asana for that reason, because you might not, it might not resonate with you. You might not need it, but you will at least acknowledge that they're different to the others. And so I think that's a good example of what happens when you don't have a narrative, right? Is that you do kind of blur in with all the others.

The key thing to remember here as well with this one is that you're fighting against a concept, right? You're not going, look at how bad Asana are at this. We're going to do it better because it's almost too personal. It's like a very specific thing. Instead you're going, all these tools, they do this, we do this differently. You're fighting against a concept, not a competitor. But then the last one.

Eric M. (20:25.373)
Right, right. It's not David versus Goliath. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe (20:29.07)
Yeah, which is nice because that's the segue to the last of those three villains, which is that, right? So that's where, I call this one market leader malaise, malaise being a really fancy word for boredom and like, get your tiredness and so on. And the concept here is essentially that David vs Goliath that you've just said. So here it's like, there's a clear market leader, clear front runner.

you just want to kind of nibble at them as the sort of small fish in this new pond and go you know what though we could probably take some of their market share and then you need a narrative to do that because the default in this world is just pick that one and I think a good example of this would be a tool called ButterDocs I don't know if you've heard of those

So they are essentially a Google Docs alternative and they market themselves as a Google Docs alternative. Like the first thing they call out is that they are an alternative to Google Docs. And what they could have done is they could have niched down. They could have gone, we're the Google Docs kind of thing, but for accountants. I don't know why I always choose accountants, but there you go. They're the Google Docs for accountants. And...

Eric M. (21:38.877)
You're trying to pick something safe, you know? Everybody knows what accountant is. That's a good example. DuckDuckGo is another good example. Have you heard of DuckDuckGo, the search engine? Yeah, the alternative, like if you don't want to be tracked everywhere. Exactly. Yeah, I got you, I got you. Okay.

Joe (21:42.574)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, hopefully.

Joe (21:52.142)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Taking on Google, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that's an example. And yeah, and what ButterDocs do is they say Google Docs is chaotic. That's the word they use. They say Google Docs is just completely chaotic as an environment to write in and to create in. We wanted to do something better that wasn't chaotic. And that's their narrative. Their narrative is...

look at us, we're taking on the big boys Google. Help, help join us. You know, like I'd like join us on that fight. And it's a really interesting narrative because you are calling out a competitor directly. But the only reason you can get away with it is because that Gulf is so big between ButterDocs and Google Docs that like, it's fine. Joey, like, like if you.

What's another analogy here? I like analogies. If you're in a pond and there's a few fish swimming around that are the same size as you, you're probably not going to try and nick their food because they're going to fight you. And you might not win that fight because you're all a similar size. If you try and take on, if you try and sort of swim around a shark as your little fish and kind of just, you know, there are, there are fish that do this. They kind of follow along and sort of pick up some of the detritus that the shark leaves behind.

Eric M. (22:58.781)
Yeah. Yeah.

Joe (23:13.806)
The sharks, like, I don't care about that little fish, I'm too big. But it means that they're not gonna just swallow you whole and you don't have to, you know, like, they almost ignore you. And that's the advantage you have, I suppose, is by taking them on. If that makes sense.

Eric M. (23:23.389)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's like a lion. He's not going to waste his energy. A lion's not going to waste his energy hunting a mice or a mouse. You know, he's going to go after a deer. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe (23:33.326)
Exactly, yeah. Yeah, so the mouse would be smart to just follow alongside the lion and just have a little nibble every now and then at the food that's left behind and sort of slowly grow until they can take the lion on.

Eric M. (23:42.525)
Yeah, yeah. And chaotic is exactly, exactly. And chaotic, I don't know about if that's the right word. I mean, when you were telling me this, I'm thinking chaotic. Well, for me, chaos is trying to juggle two kids at home while working full time and managing meetings and stuff. So I don't think Google Docs is chaotic from my perspective, but you know, yeah.

Joe (23:59.918)
Mmm.

Joe (24:04.238)
Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm not saying that that's necessarily the right word, but it's an example, obviously, of like, they do actually break it down a lot, just on the website now. They do, you know, documents that get messier as you go, unclear outlines, disorganized research, breaking focus, anonymous elephants watching you, right? Like they call out all these specific pain points that people have with Google Docs and essentially go, here's why.

Eric M. (24:20.733)
Yeah, I got it.

Eric M. (24:30.269)
See, a different kind of geek would be into that. I would call myself a nerd and a geek, but that's not my stuff. I nerd out on different things. Yeah, yeah. Okay, all right. Before we wrap this up, I want to talk about a show that you've been watching recently. I don't know if you've been, I don't know if you're like binging this show or whatever, but I think it's called Buying London. I think there was an episode that stood out to you about a certain house. Why did that episode stand out?

Joe (24:35.566)
Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah.

Joe (24:44.014)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Joe (24:52.782)
Yeah.

Joe (24:58.126)
Yeah, I just want to point out though before people tarnish me with like, this guy's got awful taste in TV. You know, first he's talking about how I met your mother, then he's talking about buying London. Buying London is quite possibly one of the worst TV shows I've ever seen, but it hooks you in. You know, you kind of, it's about sales, real estate salespeople based in London.

Eric M. (25:10.749)
Ha ha!

Joe (25:25.39)
and they're selling homes for millions of pounds to celebrities, you know, like Hollywood A -list celebrities. You watch it because you're like, I want to see what these houses are like, right? You know, I want to see how the other half lives.

And then you kind of stay for the sort of inter -politics drama of the office and people falling out, and you know, yeah, look at these people who think they've got it all together but actually hate each other and hate themselves. And it's kind of nice in that sense. Sort of like a punching up kind of thing. And yeah, there was an episode where...

Obviously they look around all these houses and after a while all these houses start to blur together. I think this is the analogy that I was getting at is all but all of these fancy houses they all look luxurious, beautiful, lavish but they're kind of all the same when it really boils down to it. Once you've seen a few you've seen them all kind of thing. And...

Eric M. (26:17.373)
Yeah, especially if they were like over 100 years old. I'm imagining there's a lot of castles on the show maybe. I don't know. I mean...

Joe (26:25.422)
There were a couple of castles, yeah, we don't all live in castles in England but there were some castles. There were also like, you know, fancy houses in London where you're paying way too much for like two bedrooms, in my opinion. Yeah, you know the ones, yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't know, I don't, yeah.

Eric M. (26:43.005)
Yeah, yeah, with like the black door in front. Yeah, and it's got like the middle knob and the door. What's up with the middle knob? I mean, the middle knob is really hard to open and close. Who put the knob there?

Joe (26:55.022)
I agree. I don't, you never know which hand to lead with, you go with both hands, just kind of like a, like a, like a cup it in both hands. I don't know. It's probably not even designed to be used, is it? You'd have a doorman that does that for you, I think. So, so yeah, it's, yeah, you just know, you're not thinking wealthy enough. That's, that's your problem. So, where was I? What was I saying? yeah. So there was an episode, there was an episode where with one house in particular that stuck in my head, which is that.

Eric M. (27:07.069)
That's right.

Eric M. (27:16.637)
Hahaha!

Joe (27:24.974)
it actually had like a little annex building with a recording studio in and it was I think it was owned by the guitarist or something from Roxy Music which is some sort of band that's way before my time and they had this little recording studio I think Paul Weller was recording an album in there like the week before they were doing this tour of the house and that's the one that stuck in my head and I was thinking about this and I was like

The reason it stuck in my head is because there's a bit of a story behind it, right? There's, it was owned by this musician and music producer. It's got a slightly, it's got a different feature to it, right? It's got a recording studio. None of the others had a recording studio. So it has that point of difference and that narrative behind it. And I was like, huh.

That's a bit like Sass, right? It's not exactly the same, obviously, because we're talking about houses. But in a similar vein, there's lots of products out there that blur together, like you mentioned with Asana and so on. They kind of blur into one. You've seen one. You've seen them all. But actually, if you have that narrative, it sticks out in the mind, like I was saying before. And that's the one you remember and keep coming back to. It might not even be the nicest house. That's also important.

Eric M. (28:19.005)
Yeah. Yeah.

Joe (28:41.166)
but it's the one that you remember, right? And I think it's, you know, the best product isn't necessarily the one that wins. It's the one that tells the best story, in my opinion, is the one that wins. And I think, yeah, there you go. That's a nice quote to wrap up on.

Eric M. (28:50.717)
Absolutely. This reminds me of a, yeah, no, it reminds me of an episode of Seinfeld. George is looking to buy a car. He sees this used car. He's not that into it. And the salesman tells him, John Boyd owned this car and John Boyd, the actor. And he's like, really? He ends up buying the car and everybody, all of his friends, John Boyd used to own this car. John Boyd. Anyway.

Joe (29:01.614)
Mm -hmm.

Joe (29:07.95)
Right.

Joe (29:15.246)
Hahaha

Eric M. (29:18.493)
Jerry's like looking through his glove department for something, the glove box, and he sees like an old piece of paper and it's got John Voight's name on it, but it's spelled differently than the actor's name. So it was a different John Voight.

Joe (29:32.654)
Right, yeah. I mean, that's a great example as well. I think one of the things, we probably don't have time to go into all of this detail, to be honest, but one of the things that's really interesting is that storytelling and marketing isn't new, right? Like salespeople, marketers, they've known that this is how to do it.

Eric M. (29:33.597)
Yeah, yeah

Joe (29:52.494)
but it seems to have got lost, especially in B2B where it's like, it should all be about data and analytics. And it feels like marketers these days are really good at crunching numbers, but not so good at creating stories and doing the storytelling part. And it feels like a misstep in my opinion, I suppose, which is why I'm trying to bring it back, bring back the storytelling. Yeah.

Eric M. (30:14.269)
Well, that's what you're helping. That's that's why you're here. You're helping brands find their narrative. And I'm going to put a link to your LinkedIn profile and your website. You got to have a new a new website coming up soon called spill agency or at least a new design, right?

Joe (30:23.406)
Cool, yeah, great.

Joe (30:29.006)
Yeah I'm redesigning the website, a ton of different ideas, just cleaning it up a bit. I won't bore you listeners with the details of that but hopefully by the time they listen to this and click through it'll be a shiny new website. So they won't even necessarily know what the old one was I suppose but you know, they'll know it's new.

Eric M. (30:44.125)
All right.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm thinking there could be some toy soldiers in the front that are, well, we'll see. We'll see how it looks. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe (30:52.846)
yeah, yeah, could put a little like Easter egg on, yeah.

Eric M. (30:58.077)
Joe, thanks for coming on innovators collab.

Joe (31:02.126)
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been great.

Eric M. (31:04.573)
Yeah, no, it was a pleasure. Everybody listening. If you enjoyed this, tell your friends about it, hit the subscribe button and I'll be back next week. Until then, this is Eric signing off. Cheers.